A standard metric while is about 3.5 minutes.

Kids: Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
Dad: Ask me again in a little while.
(3.5 minutes later)
Kids: Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?

An Imperial or American while is variable in length.

We haven't seen you in a quite a while.

New York: half an hour
Idaho: 3.75 years
Georgia: 32 years

I'll do it in a while.

Dad's house: Right now.
Washington, DC: in an eternity, if you're lucky.

Mom?

The green glow of meteors is caused by ionization of gases, which emit photons when they de-excite, or drop from the energized to a less energized state.

Nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen and water are the commonly ionized gases, which produce colours in the blue-purple-violet part of the spectrum. The red-orangish-yellow-green end of the spectrum is lower energy than the violet end of the spectrum. Details would probably only interest (or inform) a physicist, but the object which fell was most likely an unusually large meteorite which may have looked as big as a whale because of the glowing air surrounding it. It was almost certainly smaller than a big whale and maybe smaller than a dolphin. It could have been mostly ice, mostly stone, mostly metal or even a piece of space junk, possibly smaller than a bread box.

If I understood the Wikipedia articles correctly, the yellow-green glow is longer lasting. Meteors start out glowing violet-blue and end up glowing yellow-green. Octarine, the eighth colour of the rainbow on Diskworld, the colour of magic, is greenish-purplish. It's hard to imagine but you'll know it when you see it, and the most likely time to see it is when you are nearly struck by lightning or a meteor about to become a meteorite or a splat.

SDRR: Lord Dimwit: Fano: Do not try to escape. You are in my control. Look at me: I am the sum of all evils. Look carefully. My power infests all times, all galaxies, all dimensions. But many still seek me out; a green jewel they must possess. But see how I destroy their lives.
[blogs.westword.com image 438x288]

So...am I a failure as a human being for being incapable of making it through that movie? It did nothing for me.

Smoke more dope first.

Dropping acid helps, too.

Naesen: How did they know it was as big as a whale? Did someone have a whale on hand to measure with? Who keeps a whale around as a measuring device?

It was smaller than a Delaware.

Just a meteor shower. Nothing to see here.

The two eyewitness reports sure didn't sound like a meteor shower.

Got to get that Infinite Improbability Drive fixed.

sweater_pups: there is a type-o in the headline.

-

Was it a creepy green light?

boozehat: netweavr: boozehat: Why do mod's correct type-o's and make the whole thread lame half way through?

Automated script probably.

shouldn't that script run before the post?

...why would the type-o get posted for all of the TF'ers, then get corrected after it goes green? maybe that's the point of being a TF'er? you can pay to get in on the type-o jokes? :|

i ain't a TF-er and i got a 'while' joke in. It doesn't make any sense anymore, but it's there.

J. Frank Parnell: The answer comes from professional meteorologists. According to the National Weather Service, there was a meteor shower that morning.

The word professional is thrown around a lot these days.

Professionals built the Titanic; amateurs built the Ark.

screwzloos: Let's see... if it was the size of an average whale, it would be about in the 10000kg range, and if it was an average velocity meteorite, it would travel about in the 20 km/second range. A bit of physics refresher and some Wikipedia numbers tells me the impact for that would be in the tens of kilotons. Did anybody see any mushroom clouds, with much of the lake evaporated off and/or blown out into the surrounding woods?

Then it wasn't the size of a whale and/or it wasn't from space.



game was a bit off, but the movie...oddly enough, did have quite a mushroom cloud.


/Hello, Ground!
//glad this has been THOROUGHLY covered in this thread